Monday, May 19, 2008

Endtimes: The politics of Fear 1

Iran is not only a state that facilitates terrorism.

The United States, as President George Bush’s opponents in the U.S. Congress never tire of reminding us, is engaged in a hot war in Iraq. Many of the Democrat primary presidential candidates – including, to mention just two, U.S. senators Barcak Obama and Chris Dodd - and their media supporters continue to favor an unconditional withdrawal from that war patterned after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, an “orderly” withdrawal followed by mayhem, murder, the slaughter and imprisonment of innocents, and the humiliating betrayal of those in Vietnam, such as the Hmong tribesmen, who supported our actions.

A similar turn of events has been anticipated in Iraq should American troops be forced to withdraw at this stage of the war. By precipitously withdrawing its troops, the United States would leave all in Iraq who had supported its military actions at the mercy of vicious terrorists supported by Iran and Syria. The innocents who would most suffer under such a regime would be, to mention just one group, the Kurds, once Saddam Hussein’s principle victims -- who have done everything we have asked them to do and perhaps would prefer to remain unslaughtered.

A precipitous withdrawal from a war theatre in which American and Iraqi troops have lately been successful also would destabilize the entire Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, from which Europe and the United States receive the energy products needed in order to keep the printing presses at the New York Times humming.

Iran is a state that has pledged to destroy Israel, supports with training and munitions terrorists operating in Iraq that have targeted American troops, and has been developing a nuclear weapons program that easily may be reinstituted soon after the American troops have withdrawn, at which point the so-called “president” of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, true to his word, may be expected to make Israel go poof.

Both Ahmadinejad and the so called “president” of Syria, Bashar al-Asad, are ambitious men; their aim and ambition is to do in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and perhaps Turkey what they are doing now, successfully, in Lebanon.

Ahmadinejad, the wackier of the two, will not be satisfied until the hostilities in the Middle East usher in the Endtimes, the age of the twelfth Imam, after which Islam will recover the splendor it lost when Queen Isabella chased the Moors out of Spain in the 15th century.

In its rapid move north from Medina, Islam was checked in what is now France in 732 by Charles “The Hammer” Martel, whose military methods in the battle of Tours would not have passed muster with the current U.S. Congress. From its beginnings in the early 7th century to the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in 1918, Islam was first a dominant then a retreating force in North Africa, Spain, Italy France, Russia, Persia, the Balkans and India.

Some of this has become a proper subject for discussion in the American presidential election now under way.

The universally reviled outgoing President George Bush contributed his mite to the discussion when, addressing the Israel Knesset on the 60th year of Israel’s bloody birth, he said: “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

In fact, the allusion to the Nazis is not at all implausible. Everyone is familiar with Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jewish problem. Ahmadinejad foresees a similar “solution,” and he has not been hiding his vision of a future without Israel under a bushel basket; it has been prominently displayed in his speeches and addresses.

Increasingly, as the presidential campaign lumbers on, Democrats have raised aloft the slogan, “the politics of fear” every time Republicans and the much reviled Senator Joe Lieberman point to the dangers of appeasement. But the slogan is little more than a rhetorical devise designed to wedge out of office those who support what ought to be called the resistance to a form of Islam that is profoundly anti-Western. If we wake to find an intruder rummaging in our bureau drawer, should we not be at least “wary” that a theft is in progress? If after calling the police we find that the thief’s comrades have bombed the police station and stoned the mayor’s wife as a kafir, should our emotions not move beyond wariness to something else – not fear, which freezes the senses, but a fierce resolution to resist with our minds, our hearts and our blood? At what point will Chris Dodd and Barack Obama become -- if not fearful -- then at least less placid about the aims and ambitions of such as Ahmadinejad and Asad?

In an attempt to quiet the very real fears of Israelis and Jews here in the United States, Obama has given assurances that he will defend Israel militarily. Having retreated from a hot war in Iraq to Camp Lejeune, he ought to be asked “From where?”